Captives and Prisoners
by CuteKick
Summary: One shot of Guile and Mystique sharing a bit of an intimate moment while Guile is being held in a cell by M. Bison.


**Captives and Prisoners**

As Guile slowly regained consciousness, he found that he still remained surrounded by complete darkness. He could feel that he was sitting on a cold floor and slumped in the corner of a stone room. As his senses returned to him more completely he stood and attempted to move, but to his dismay he found that he was shackled at the wrists and chained to the wall. Guile knew then that he had finally been captured by M. Bison and was now being held prisoner. He pulled at his heavy restraints and cursed into the blackness, determined to break free and kill M. Bison once and for all.

They did not give an inch, and Guile hung his head.

As the last of the fog cleared away Guile shot his head back up frantically. Where was his team? What had become of Nash? And Cammy? He pulled at his chains again, furious now as the events of their last encounter rapidly played through his mind.

Information that had been obtained during his interrogation of Rolento had led them to a building complex suspected of being used a narcotics distribution center. When Guile, Cammy, and Nash had arrived they found that information to be accurate; the place was packed with drugs ready for shipment. But the criminals responsible for running the place were nowhere to be found, and they were seized upon by a squad of Sentinels. Cammy and Nash had run out of the building as Guile reached the rooftop to cover their escape. His mighty sonic booms had toppled a couple of the Sentinels before the building was leveled by the remaining monstrous robots, taking Guile down with it.

The pain from the injuries Guile had sustained began to break though the temporary distraction his anger had provided and he collapsed against the stone wall, almost unable to remain standing. There was nothing he could do about it now, he knew. As he began to resign himself to his current situation, with no apparent avenue of escape, his only thoughts were of his team and how he hoped that they had made it out of the fight alive.

A loud bang suddenly interrupted the silence and Guile froze, listening intently. There was a screech of metal grating against metal followed by another bang. From somewhere in the dark dungeon a door had been opened and closed. Guile wondered if his teammates were also being held in cells here, but he remained silent.

A faint light began to illuminate the place and it was growing closer. Guile heard soft footsteps on the stone floor as his visitor drew nearer. He could see the thick rusty bars of his prison cell now. They were too far away from him for his chained hands to reach. The light approached and was soon before him, forcing him to squint against the unusual brightness at first, but after a few moments he realized it was a single candle. It danced about in the chilly breeze that had followed his visitor into the prison, casting shadows that jumped in every direction. Yet it remained there for long moments, as if whoever had arrived, still concealed in the blackness behind the light, wished only to look upon him in chains.

A stiff metallic clink, then, and the gate to his cell noisily slide open. The light of the candle mysteriously died to a soft flicker, and his visitor stepped inside and into full view.

It was a woman, and Guile was sure that he had never seen one quite like her before. Her straight, firey red hair just touched her shoulders and her skin was a soft shade of blue. The white dress she wore hung from around her neck and draped her shapely figure closely, with slits running from the waist down either side. A belt of small skulls hung loosely about her curves of her hips. She placed the candle on a slab of stone jutting out from one of the walls, the only other feature of the cell besides the barred door itself, and stepped closer to him.

"I see that you're still alive," she said in a soft husky voice, her ruby lips full and expressive.

"Who the hell are you?" Guile growled as he stared into her unnatural, white eyes.

"There's no need to be brash," she teased with a sly smile. "I've come to check up on you, maybe even keep you company for awhile. Unless, of course, you would prefer me to just leave you here to die."

The woman turned and closed the door, locking herself in, and then leaned back against its bars as she faced Guile once more. When Guile's only response was his intense stare, she spoke again:

"My name is Mystique. I'm an acquaintance of Charles Xavier." She hoped only to placate the man at the mention of Xavier's name. In truth, their relationship had met its bitter end long ago.

"You're a mutant working for Bison," Guile spat.

Mystique matched his stare for only a moment before looking away. Her eyes could not offer any emotion that could match the hatred in his; he had not taken the bait.

"Are you always so disagreeable first thing in the morning?" Mystique deflected with a giggle. "Yes, I am here on behalf of General Bison. He wanted me to make sure you hadn't died before he could kill you himself."

She dared to step closer to him. "Though, if it were up to me, the things I would do with you…" She trailed off, her body tense and ready to react if he tried to attack her. When there was no reaction at all from the man she slowly, carefully, reached up with a hand and wiped away the beads of sweat that had formed on his brow with her fingertips.

"We may need to clean you up a bit first," she whispered hotly.

Guile scoffed and shook his head, not concerned in the least about the woman's attention. "M. Bison is going to kill you when you've outlived your usefulness to him. What kind of promises did he make to sucker you into doing his dirty work?"

Mystique stepped away from him, shifting her weight to one side and placing her hands on her hips. "That's none of your concern," she said curtly. "All you have to look forward to when that time comes is a slow death at M. Bison's hands, and none of your friends will be left to save the day."

Guile could tell immediately that he had struck a nerve with the blue-skinned woman, and it caught him off guard. He quickly began thinking of a way to exploit it. Mystique was not loyal to M. Bison or Shadaloo without the promise of some reward, which meant that she could still be reasoned with. But what was it that Bison could offer a woman like her to make all of this worth her while? He watched the shine of her blue skin in the candle light, her white eyes still staring daggers at him, and the answer suddenly occurred to him. He blinked disbelievingly at the realization and shook his head.

"You think he can make you a normal human again," he stated flatly. In his experience with the X-Men and their struggle for equal treatment in society, he had heard the narrative before. What would any of them give to have their powers erased, to be able to live a normal life without prejudice?

Mystiques expression turned to one of rage, and long moments passed during which she could only glare at him and hate him for judging her. What did this man know of such things! He looked upon her the same way they all did. With pity? With disgust? He was laughing at her, cruelly teasing her, and she hated him more every second that passed by.

And yet, even though he was the one chained to a wall, Mystique was the true prisoner. She was a prisoner to her genetic deformity, chained to a biological malfunction that she could not break out of. In truth she hated _herself_ and not this man, who by all appearances was the just one in the fight against M. Bison and his organization, Shadaloo. She felt her eyes begin to sting, and quickly buried her pain away. It would not serve her to let the prisoner see her fall apart.

"Is there any anything wrong with that?" Mystique asked at length. She took a measured step toward him again. "Is there not something that you want? What you would give to have that which you desire most?

"Bison doesn't give a shit about you," he said evenly, picking up on her attempt to regain the advantage in their little game. "He lied to you, kid. Nobody is going to get anything out of this war except him."

Seeing her play fall flat, Mystique could not entertain the charade any longer. She thrust her hand to his throat and gripped it tightly. "What makes you so sure?" she hissed.

"I know more about M. Bison that you would ever want to," Guile replied struggling to form his words in Mystique's choke hold.

She inched her way ever closer to him and peered up into his icey blue eyes. "I know more of him than I do of you. What if _you_ are the liar? What if I think you are trying to fool me? I could kill you right now and tell Bison you died of your injuries."

"What's so damn bad about the way you are?" Guile asked with the last of his breath before she was squeezing so hard that it made it impossible for him to speak any more.

During the tense pause that followed Mystique glared at Guile incredulously. The look in his eyes as he expelled breath for what could have been the last time did not betray the sincerity of his query. She slowly released her hold on him, air returning to him in great gasps, and let it fall to rest on his heaving chest. She sighed heavily under the weight of her inner turmoil and her posture slumped wearily.

"I don't know anything about you," Mystique said softly. "And I don't have the energy any more to keep pretending that I hate you. But do not mock me."

Her white eyes snapped back up to him on those last words. She searched his expression for something to reignite her fury, some hint of judgment against her that she could use to use to justify killing him after all. But his eyes had softened, and they seemed to be pleading with her to share her own vulnerability. After falling into his gaze for long moments, Mystique could only shake her head at her own absurdity.

"I don't know why I am even speaking to you of these things," she confessed.

Guile sought to press the advantage yet again in her moments of doubt, and he spoke as gently as he could muster: "I don't know much about why mutants are mutants. Xavier believes that some things just are what they are. Bison is the one mocking you; he damn sure isn't interested in helping you find peace."

"You don't understand," Mystique replied, her white eyes shimmering at the man as she leaned in even closer.

"Then tell me." Guile was so close to having her.

"Let me ask you a question," Mystique asked, and in an instant her initial sultry demeanor had returned. "Do you think I'm pretty?"

Guile tensed as Mystique then draped her arms around his neck and pressed her supple body into him. He had been too eager, he realized, and Mystique was not so easily cooed. She slipped a thigh through the long slit in her dress and pressed it between his legs, drawing an audible grunt of surprise.

"If you don't," she continued, standing on her toes to look him at him squarely, "I will understand. In fact, allow me to be the one that you want most."

To Guile's complete shock, Mystique's body began to melt against him. Her features molded together in a shifting, blue mass of putty. Her flesh was moving against him like warm clay, a sensation so foreign to his senses that it sent a shiver down his spine. She molded herself around him for several moments, and then he could feel her becoming solid again, her arms once more holding him closely around his neck. But when she finally pulled away to face him, Guile forgot to breath at the sight of her now, because standing in front of him then was not Mystique.

Cammy White now peered at him through deep emerald eyes, smiling coyly at him.

"What do you think of me now, love?"

It was Cammy's voice, her lilting accent, flawless in tone and inflection. Every detail of her face and her hair and her body was represented to absolute perfection, and Mystique's genetic gift was revealed.

She was a shape-shifter.

"What the hell..?" was all that Guile could manage.

Mystique, in her assumed form as Cammy, embraced him again. She caressed his muscular shoulders and arms and breathed hotly on his neck, and she pressed her body into him tightly. Guile could not deny his own longing for the experience to be real, to finally be close to Cammy. His feelings for the woman, for the real Cammy White, assaulted him, and he told himself that he would have resisted were it not for his shackled hands, would have pushed this imposter away at the first opportunity.

But would he? Would he ever have the chance to come this close to sharing such a moment with his teammate, whom he had foolishly developed feelings for? Did Cammy share the same feelings, or would she rebuff his affections if he ever confessed them to her? Mystique had truly intoxicated him with his own emotions, and though he forced himself to push away the fantasy and accept the deception for what it was, he could not help but hold the utmost respect for the shape-shifter's final winning tactic in their encounter.

"I'd put my mouth on yours," Cammy-not-Cammy said. "In fact, I could do all the things that I know you want me to, right here in this cell. But I know you would not want to waste that magical first time on a phony."

Mystique, feeling that she had made the poor fool suffer enough, released him and stepped back. Before his eyes her body once again pooled together in a mass of fair skin, green cloth and blonde pigtails. The swirl of shifting flesh faded to soft blue, then red, then white, and then those colors began to separate into their places, until Mystique stood solidified in her true form.

Guile swallowed the rest of the feelings he was still experiencing for Cammy in a heavy gulp, and then steeled himself against the shape-shifter once again.

"Not bad," he told her, understating how amazed her truly was.

But tears rolled down Mystiques round blue cheeks. "I hate it."

"Listen to me," guile said more urgently than he had intended. "Don't buy into Bison's bullshit. He's using you, kid. He's not going to help you in the end."

"I told you already," replied Mystique coldly. "I don't have any other choice."

Guile pulled on his chains emphatically. "Let me out of here. I swear I will take care of M. Bison. And then I'll get you to Xavier. He's the one that can help you find the answers you need."

The earnest look in the man's eyes touched her against all resistance. He was truly the good guy, this battle-hardened special operator, and he would cling to his ideals of freedom and justice until he no longer drew breath on this earth, even on behalf of a mutant whom he did not know, and whom had committed her own share of atrocities against those who shared a similar ideology. Yet she could not accept such sacrifice, because, in spite of her burning desire to be rescued from her hideous nature, Mystique did not in her heart even feel worthy of such deliverance. All she had become was a tool of deception, and somewhere along the way it had corrupted her, such that her greatest feat of deception, after everything that she had been through, was against herself.

She sighed so heavily then, resigned as she was to her miserable role in the war that still raged on outside the walls of this prison between mutants and humans, between Shadaloo and Guile's team of freedom fighters. Mystique knew acutely and more painfully now than ever that Guile's words were true. She was but a pawn in M. Bison's game, but worse than that, she had played herself a pawn in her own campaign for an identity that she could call her own.

This, what she was now and what she had done to become it, was her real identity.

"The X-Men and I have a very long history of conflicting interests," she said with no further explanation. Mystique wiped the tears off of her face. "Xavier would only turn me away."

"Then I'll find another way for you," Guile insisted. "There's another way."

"Stop this foolishness," Mystique told him, but it was not an angry command. She was simply tired of the man torturing himself to find a way to help her, when she knew that she was not deserving of it. The result of her agreement with M. Bison would be what she deserved, whatever it may be.

"Everything I've told you is true," Guile replied. He too no longer expected the engagement to conclude with anything less than his continued captivity. His arms relaxed against the restraints and he stood looking at the women, who looked back at him in the moment of impasse that they now shared.

"And I believe you," she whispered. Mystique approached him again, this time with no other motive than to be near him. "But I must follow this path that I've started down. I will do as General Bison says, and fulfill my part of the arrangement."

"It's a mistake," Guile said gently. "We can come up with-"

"I have to go now," she interrupted him. "His eyes are everywhere." Mystique bit her lip to keep from shedding a single tear more; the time for crying was over. "I could have never imagined that a man like you really existed."

She turned and opened the cell door, but suddenly rushed back him, throwing her arms around him and kissing him deeply.

"There was nothing phony about that," she whispered.

Mystique hurried away from him and out of the cell, locking Guile inside with a brightly burning candle.


End file.
